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Friday 31st May

Big Brother is watching you: the end of data privacy in Europe. Anyone who hopes that the traditions of individual freedom in Britain will lead to resistance to such moves should think again: the British government played a major rôle in pushing through this legislation.

If Stephen Byers thought that resigning his government post would make his troubles go away, he is going to be disappointed. Railtrack shareholders are planning to sue him for “misfeasance in public office”; Martin Sixsmith is planning on selling his story, one which will “‘finish’ Byers.”

Jeffrey Archer — even he would probably not try to say that those who know him best know he is not a liar — is to be the subject of a satirical drama by the BBC:

"It is his life seen through his eyes, his contribution not just to national events but to world events," [Jane Tranter, the BBC’s controller of drama commissioning] said. "It is a very funny portrayal of how Jeffrey Archer might think his life has worked out."

He will be seen "generously taking the blame" over the prostitute scandal that eventually led to his downfall and he will even explain his purported influence on the Beatles.

The Telegraph’s Tim Robey finds the remake of The Time Machine depressingly dumbed down. Before moving in for what seems to be a well-deserved kill on the movie in question, he makes a general point about SF movies:

Science fiction movies have virtually nothing to do with science fiction any more. They’re all gadgetry and design, and usually amount to little more than the futuristic dressing-up of war films, Westerns or horror flicks in space.

In this context I really do have to ask what planet he’s been on. “Science fiction” movies have almost never had anything to do with science fiction. There are exceptions — Things to Come, Destination Moon, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey to pick a few good examples — but on the whole, for just about as long as supposedly SF films have been made, most of them have been transpositions of an existing genre into space or the future and most of them have been laden with gadgetry if not necessarily design.

The problem with complaining about SF movies not being real SF is that it misses the point. 2010 was real science fiction. It was crap, but it was real science fiction. Alien was a horror flick in space — it was also rather good, as was Blade Runner (film noir in the future). Star Wars is an amalgam of westerns and war films in space — that’s pretty much a description of space opera, after all, which is a long-established subset of SF as a genre — and was damn good fun.

What matters for a movie is not whether it is true to its genre, good though that may be at times, but whether it is a good movie. Where Robey is dead on target is attacking dumbing down, and Hollywood’s insistence on giving every protagonist a simplistic motivation — usually the death of a lover, sometimes the death of a parent — which ignores the complex forces which drive real people in the real world.

Note, by the way, that I am not saying there’s anything wrong with a movie being simply fun; the problem is when a movie should have greater depth and this is swept away by moronic film-making. Sadly, as Robey points out, every recent version of one of H.G. Wells’ stories falls into this category.

At one point in the 1970s there was a plan mooted to make the Royal Household a department of state; this was blown out of the water by HM the Q herself, who let it be known that if it happened she would live in one of her private residences, only going to Buckingham Palace for official functions.

Comedians without a sense of humour: Baddiel & Skinner may sue Real Radio over a send-up of their Three Lions song which includes the lines “They’re going out, they’re going out, England’s going out” and “Three Lions in the dirt, Beckham, Fowler, Owen/All those years of hurt, listen to them moaning.”

Punch closes down, again.

Thursday 30th May

Yesterday I linked to David Coursey’s tale of of how Office XP suddenly decided it needed “reactivation” while he was on an aeroplane some 2,000 miles from home. At the bottom of the article are some links to other articles — one of which is a dead link with the excellent title Does Microsoft think users are dumb? — including two columns on why Microsoft drives him nuts. I’ve often thought of producing a similar list myself, but why put my blood pressure through that. Some of the things he complains about don’t particularly bother me, but one in particular did strike a chord:

Please make some sort of peace with Real so everyone can read everyone else’s media formats.

Oh, yeah. Like everyone else who has used Macs or PCs I’ve had to use RealPlayer in various versions to handle streamed media. I’ve never liked it — it is the one piece of software I’ve used which makes Microsoft products seem stable; it is a real resource hog; plus the advertising features are pretty obtrusive. The problem is that streamed media from many sites — particularly news sites — demand the RealPlayer, so you’re stuck with it.

I’ve just had to install, as part of my current system changes, the latest version of RealPlayer, or RealOne as it now is called. As this screenshot shows, cosmetically it is much more appealing than its predecessors:

That picture shows the program playing a CD — RealOne is every bit as unstable as earlier versions when it comes to streaming media. If you are connected to the Internet it will automatically (unless you set the preferences otherwise) go and get information about the CD you are playing. As you can see, often this will display a picture of the album cover, as well as the title and artist, plus a full track listing. This isn’t always completely accurate — one disc had two of its tracks transposed — but it is useful enough that I personally don’t mind that this info is probably being used for marketing purposes.

There is one insulting piece of stupidity, however. If you look closely at the top left of the window, we see this:

So, I’ve taken the CD which I own from the box with the same picture on the cover as RealOne displays and I have placed it in the CD-ROM drive where it is playing as I type. Why the fuck is RealOne asking me if I want to buy it? I ALREADY BOUGHT IT, SMEGHEADS! That’s why I’m playing it. How difficult is that to understand?

A final little point about RealOne — as the above shot shows, it lists supposedly “similar artists” to those currently playing. I have no idea how Real define similar, but some of the suggestions are weird. This is what is suggested as a list of similar artists to David Bowie:

• ABC
• Adrian Belew
• The Bonzo Dog Band
• John Cale
• The Cars

The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band? Similar to Bowie? On what planet?

I almost choked, laughing, on my coffee when I heard this on the radio this morning. A British Airways Boeing 777 has got stuck in the tarmac of a runway at Antigua’s airport. Nothing can fly in or out, and there is nothing on the island big enough to move the aeroplane. Don’t you feel sorry for those poor passengers, all 140 of them, stranded on a Caribbean island?

I can’t find where on the Web this picture of Ronaldo came from, so if anyone can let me know the URL please do so. It was forwarded to me with the comment quoted.

You thought Prince Phillip was bad…

There’s no doubt what the really big news story of the moment is, though you could be misled by many of the British papers, obsessed as they are with asylum seekers, Mr. "Honestly, I’m not a liar" Byers, David Beckham and the bizarre belief that England will win the World Cup (well, it might happen — if terrorists take out France, Brazil, Italy, Argentina… ).

Someone today said that the situation between India and Pakistan is the greatest crisis since the Cuban missile crisis. Actually, I think it is much worse than the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev were both fairly rational, and they were both leaders of countries which fundamentally did not want a nuclear war, certain bonkers generals aside.

As it stands, Pakistan has said it is entirely prepared to use nuclear weapons in response to a purely conventional attack by India. In such an event India would retaliate — and India believes that while it would suffer tremendous damage in a nuclear exchange, Pakistan would be utterly destroyed. In an article in The New York Times Salman Rushdie points out the danger of a military defeat by India — assuming Pakistan resists the nuclear temptation — bringing about a coup by Islamic hardliners who just might be inclined to strap a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded bazaar that is India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber in history.

It isn’t surprising that the USA is making plans to airlift out 64,000 US citizens from the subcontinent. It’s also probably not surprising that they are considering sending in Donald Rumsfeld for some “tough talk” to avert war — but it isn’t exactly news to make you sleep easy. Donald Rumsfeld’s confused locutions make The Shrub seem a paragon of lexical virtue. The BBC’s Broadcasting House regularly features The Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week; here’s one example:

I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said then, but I… I know what I think and, wuh… I assume that’s what I said.

The thought of Rumsfeld conducting any sort of diplomacy between two nuclear powers with distinctly itchy trigger fingers is scary indeed.

I’m going to be quite busy over the next few days so I may not get a chance to update the weblog before Sunday, so I want to take chance to wish all good luck to Sweden.

Wednesday 29th May

Time is running out! Sun’s StarOffice, the suite of office software, was available free of charge prior to version 6.0. Anyone still wanting the free package (for Linux, Windows or Solaris) will have to move fast: to encourage sales of version 6.0, Sun is withdrawing the free version 5.2 as of midnight tonight. After that it won’t exactly break the bank at about $40, but that’s still a big difference from zero cost, particularly if you haven’t actually used it and want to check it out before deciding if you like it. There is still enough time to get it — with a 56k modem it should take four or five hours to download the package. The joker in the pack, of course, is that Sun says the free StarOffice 5.2 will be withdrawn at midnight tonight; they don’t say which time zone.…

It still seems to be the case that Stephen Byers has resigned (why is the Washington Post interested? or the New York Times?), so I guess he must have been telling the truth in at least part of his resignation statement. The Independent comments:

[Byers] rose up the Labour ladder, occasionally becoming too confident for his own good. Describing himself as an "outrider for the Blair project," he speculated to journalists in Blackpool that Labour might break its link with the unions. The media expected a frenzy, but Mr Blair was remarkably relaxed about the affair. As a fully paid-up Blairite, Mr Byers was allowed to get away with things that other people would not. It was a pattern that was to repeat itself and damage both men in recent months.

One interesting bit of irony is highlighted:

[Byers’] fate was probably sealed by the failure to sack Ms Moore over her e-mail. Ironically, it was not Mr Byers’ call. The decision was taken by Mr Blair, who was reluctant to punish Ms Moore for one mistake. One friend of Mr Byers said last night: "He wanted to get rid of her. The powers that be wouldn’t let him."

A report in The Times suggests the claims of his lying are not about to go away:

A survivor of the Paddington rail crash said yesterday she was prepared to testify that Stephen Byers lied to Parliament over his decision to wind up Railtrack.…

Pam Warren said that Mr Byers told her he was secretly planning to put the company into receivership. Her evidence could be crucial for Railtrack shareholders who are threatening to reject the Government’s compensation offer and take legal action against ministers on grounds of abuse of public office.

The Telegraph’s Daniel Johnson suggests this is the turning point — not for Byers, but for Blair:

This is the turning point. There comes a moment in the lifetime of every prime minister when the political world becomes aware that he is mortal.

For Tony Blair, that moment has now arrived. With the resignation of Stephen Byers, the New Labour Project has faltered for the first time since Mr Blair became leader eight years ago. The upward trajectory of his Government has levelled out and the downward descent has begun.

As Johnson says, it is not that Blair has lost a minister — he’s lost ministers before; it is not that Byers was so Blairite — Mandelson was even more Blairite, and Blair lost Bonkers Mr. Inner Steel not once but twice:

No, what makes the downfall of Mr Byers wholly different in scale is the fact that the Prime Minister had invested a vast quantity of political capital in his retention. It was Mr Blair who chose to turn the survival of his Transport Secretary into a personal test of willpower. That he has gone in spite of everything Downing Street could do will have an incalculable impact on Mr Blair’s prestige.

To find a parallel, one must go back to the last great rearguard action in defence of a minister, John Major’s attempt to retain Norman Lamont as Chancellor after Britain’s ignominious exit from the exchange rate mechanism. That struggle lasted almost exactly the same time, the eight months from September 23 1992 to May 27 1993, and was likewise ultimately unsuccessful.

Mr Lamont was given the option of demotion to another Cabinet post, angrily refused, resigned and has not spoken to Mr Major since. In that case, too, the prime minister had invested so much of his own authority in the survival of his Chancellor that he was permanently diminished by the admission of defeat. Neither he nor his government ever recovered.

So it is with Mr Blair today, though to a lesser extent. He has lost a major battle for the first time, and however many victories he may yet win, the bitter taste of defeat has marked him for ever. Mr Byers was not a mere lieutenant, but a man who shared his entire philosophy, including the ruthless cynicism and systematic mendacity that are part and parcel of New Labour. … The Prime Minister had to defend his Transport Secretary to the end because there was a perfect identity of interests. … Blair and Byers go together like Jekyll and Hyde

As it’s The Telegraph, I’m trying to find something there to disagree with.… Nope, can’t find a thing. Later in the article, though, the suggestion that this is a vindication for the Tories’ new leader, what’s-his-name, and that there is a real fight on Labour’s hands seems a conclusion too far. If Labour does come a cropper over the next couple of years — and that would be good to see — it still seems more likely that it will be because of Labour folly and corruption rather than anything the Tories do.

The downside to Byers’ fall is that he has to be replaced by some tedious Blairite… and here he is: Alistair Darling, who should dye either his eyebrows or his hair to look a bit more human.

Another effect of the reshuffle forced by Byers’ slipping off the greasy pole is that Britain now has its first ever black cabinet minister. Unfortunately, it’s Paul Boateng — almost as unbearably smug as Blair himself.

It seems like only yesterday I was talking about Gerald Ratner’s inadvertent Samson act, in which a bit of supposed levity in a speech brought down his business empire around his ears. But you can’t keep sellers of crap down: Ratner is back, and planning to sell jewellery online. I am yawning as I type.

Endor Holocaust:

What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won’t remain habitable for long.

So all the Ewoks on Endor got wiped out? At last! A silver lining to that godsawful movie.

Advertising I: Do you watch advertisements? I don’t mean do you occasionally see one — do you sit and watch them whenever they come on? Do you read every ad in every paper and magazine you read?

No, of course you don’t. I’ve been convinced for a long time that the only people who even think you might are the idiots who produce adverts. In fact, I believe there are only certain specific times when one pays attention to advertisements:

• When already looking to buy something
• When one happens to see an ad. which is really annoying

Truly, I think the most powerful effect of adverts is, frequently, to convince the viewer or reader never to patronise the manufacturers or vendors of goods or services who produce offensively moronic ads.

It looks as though my gut feelings on the subject are right.

A two-year study has been undertaken by researchers at the London Business School into the viewing behaviour of subjects representative of the British public. This is not happy reading for anyone in the ad-pushing business.

The key finding is this. We should not be asking when and why people decide not to watch ads. Rather, we should ask why they do watch them, because the glaring fact to emerge from all our households is that people spend most of their time actively avoiding ads.

Indeed, for most of our sample the ad breaks were a welcome chance to do other things. These activities varied from going for a cigarette to making the tea, to checking on the kids.…

If someone watching on their own encounters an ad break they invariably change channel. Zappers fall into two groups: "surfers" who move up and down the channels before returning, with remarkable accuracy, to their programme as the ads conclude, and "switchers" who go to a pre-designated "go-to channel" such as MTV or BBC News.…

…As the number of people watching TV increases, the probability of the ads being zapped decreases. For advertisers this means a greater likelihood of the audience being exposed to the ad. Unfortunately, however, the presence of more people in the room during the ad break increases the probability of them talking to each other. Our research reveals the same recurring pattern across all the households: a programme concludes, the body language of the whole household changes instantly, and social discourse begins at exactly the same moment as the ads start.

It is heartening to know that viewers don’t respond to TV ads, pitched as they are at such a moronic level. Occasionally, though, viewers do notice an ad — and this is even better:

When one of our sample did glimpse an ad that they wanted the rest of their household to see they would interrupt the proceedings and direct the attention of everyone to the ad. Even in these situations, however, the news is not always good. We recorded far more negative comment on these ads than positive. If households do watch the ad as a group they are more likely to criticise the ad itself or, worse still, the actual company or product being advertised.

Makes you feel better about the human race, doesn’t it?

Advertising II: People not watching adverts is something certain people seem to thing is just plain wrong. Turner Broadcasting’s CEO Jamie Kellner is quoted on MetaFilter as saying: Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots.... Any time you skip a commercial.....you’re actually stealing the programming. (Here’s the link to the actual article, but you can’t read it without paying $2.95, which doesn’t strike me as being value for money.)

I find it quite disturbing that a CEO — even an American one, even in the days of a President who can be greeted with the banner, If you can read this you’re not the President — should have such a tenuous grasp on the concept of the contract. Fortunately, he is an American and I suspect even the more dimwitted of British commercial TV executives are clued up enough to know that there is no contract between the viewer and the network — except for subscription channels, of course, but in that case the contract is: I pay you the subscription, you provide the programmes — there is no requirement that the viewer watches the ads.

Am I way off-beam or is this type of thinking — which is reminiscent of that behind draconian product registration of Windows XP and the paranoid copy protection push by the music corps — a peculiarly American disease? It seems to me that American companies often behave as though they have rights which outweigh those of their customers, and as though the customer owes them something beyond payment for the product. My impression is that British and possibly European companies are slightly more — well, sane. Can it be that American businessmen don’t understand capitalism?

Advertising III: It seems to be the advent of DVRs such as TiVo which is forcing advertisers to wake up to the fact that people don’t watch ads. This completely screws up carefully planned schedules placing certain ads together with specific programmes:

Digital video recorders … make it so easy to program and play back shows … that their owners often choose to watch what is on the machine rather than what is on TV. Ignoring the networks’ painstakingly planned schedules, they watch prime-time programs late at night and late-night programs before dinner, often oblivious to the channel on which it originally appeared.

Which is, of course, what a lot of us do with VCRs anyway; I can’t really see why a new technology which makes the activity somewhat easier should suddenly make the activity such a worry to advertisers or TV executives — as we’ve already seen, it isn’t as though people viewing live TV watch the ads anyway. But it is worrying the TV industry, in the US at least. Here comes Herr Kellner again:

One in five people who own a DVR like TiVo or ReplayTV say they never watch any commercials.…

Numbers like that have provoked gloomy pronouncements from industry executives. Some even come close to accusing habitual ad skippers of theft.

"The free television that we’ve all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There’s no Santa Claus. If you don’t watch the commercials, someone’s going to have to pay for television and it’s going to be you."

Personally, I don’t think that would necessarily be a bad thing — I’ve always felt the licence fee system here was a pretty good idea, allowing the BBC to develop interesting and thoughtful programmes. The ideology which Thatcher brought to our political culture rather fucked that up and the BBC is a shadow of its former self, but that’s still better than most commercial stations (with certain specific exceptions). I doubt that would be the route American networks would take, though.

Where the execs are missing the point is that people don’t watch ads because:

• They are boring
• They are moronic
• They are of no interest or relevance

If they want to maintain advertising revenue, why not put their minds to delivering useful advertising which people do want to see. This may mean using modern technology to allow individual viewers to select the advertising they want, but that surely is not impossible; it would also mean that ads were being seen by people more likely to make a purchase on the basis of having seen them, which surely the advertisers would find a major plus.

It wouldn’t get around the other major problem of ads, which I didn’t list above: they are obtrusive. The reason why people fast forward through ads is very simple: no one buys a TV to watch ads, they want to watch programmes. If a programme listed as running an hour in fact lasts only 40 minutes, the other twenty minutes being taken up with repetitive ads which insult the viewers’ intelligence, only the hopelessly naïve would expect viewers to like it. Perhaps targeted ads which only appeared between programmes and never in the middle of them would stand a chance of getting some attention.

Advertising IV: The BBC doesn’t carry adverts, apart from frequent ones for its own programmes (which some people seem to find infuriating — it seems to me that it is reasonable to assume people watching television may actually like watching television and therefore may be interested in knowing about forthcoming programmes, so this is actually reasonably well-targeted advertising), but it has started doing something irritating to TiVo boxes.

Users of the TiVo digital video recorder have reacted angrily to a new sponsorship feature that automatically records certain programmes, adverts and other promotional material.…

[V]iewers in the UK were surprised this week to find that the second episode of the little-known BBC sitcom "Dossa and Joe" had been recorded without their knowledge and added to the system’s main menu screen.

They were even more surprised to find that they won’t be allowed to delete the programme for one week, and that more sponsored recordings are on the way.

TiVo, of course say this won’t interefere with the user’s use of the machine; but what the hell makes them think people will want to watch something they haven’t chosen to record? How often have you set a VCR to tape something only for the network to change the schedule at the last minute so that you get something quite different from the programme you wanted to record and then sat down to watch the programme that was taped?

The makers of TiVo, along with many other companies (Microsoft, this means you) are losing sight of something important: when someone buys a product — computer, television, whatever — or the licence to use a product — software or music — it is the user’s business, within the limits of the law, what is possible and, where applicable, the terms of the licence, what he or she does with it.

Which brings us back to the slavering behemoth that is Microsoft. I have previously mentioned Windows XP and its hideous product activation. Microsoft has always said that there will be no problems for the vast majority of users. So here’s a tale of product activation woe in another M$ product, Office XP.

A funny thing happened on the way to PC Expo: Microsoft killed my copy of Office XP. Or at least that’s what the error message said, threatening me with something called "Reduced Functionality Mode" if I didn’t immediately insert my original Office disc and have my software reactivated.

"If you don’t perform the reactivation steps, Microsoft Office will go into Reduced Functionality Mode. In that mode you will not be able to save modifications to documents, or create a new document, and additional functionality may be reduced" said the "help" screen attached to the error message.…

Why did they do that? Here’s what the help screen said: "Due to a significant change in your computer configuration from when Microsoft Office was installed and activated, some important information about your computer needs to be restored, and the product needs to be reactivated to continue to function properly." …

FRANKLY, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I DID, if anything, to change the configuration of my computer. Nor should it be Microsoft’s business if I did. As it stands, I am on an airplane, my original Office disk is 6 miles below and 2,200 miles behind me, and Microsoft has just told me that Office will die if I don’t immediately reauthorize my copy.

There now, don’t you just feel all warm and secure?

Tuesday 28th May

16:10 – Stephen Byers ‘resigns’. And about feckin’ time! In his resignation statement (no questions would be taken) he claimed people who knew him best knew he was not a liar. Why don’t I feel a great urge to believe him? He also said:

I know the political obituaries will be full of talk of spin doctors, emails and who said what to whom. In today’s political world that is inevitable.

Coming from such a determined manipulator of the media, such maudlin whining deserves little respect. He may have been right to tackle Railtrack — although some think he was not — but a minister needs to be honest enough that we can believe what he says; if Byers was honest in what he said about all the various meetings where the other people present disagreed with his accounts of what had been said, then his grasp of English was so defective that he had no business occupying a government post.

Of course, it goes without saying that only the terminally cynical would imagine that Downing Street has fired him — I mean, accepted his resignation now because Parliament is in recess, the English are going potty about their Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee and the World Cup is about to kick off (irresistable cliché, I’m afraid) — so this is almost as good a time to put out bad news as, well, September 11th.

It almost certainly won’t be you: Camelot chief executive Dianne Thompson has said that players of the new lottery game stand little chance of even winning so much as £10. She really should know better than to say something like this, no matter how much Camelot spokesmen bleat about it beaing taken out of context (isn’t that practically a definition of quotation?), as she has ample experience of how damaging careless talk can be to a business:

Ms Thompson knows a thing or two about adverse economic conditions; she was the marketing director of the jewellery retailer, Ratners, when the company’s chief, Gerald Ratner, gave his infamous "crap" speech.

Mr Ratner’s comments turned an annual profit of £127m into a £122m loss virtually overnight.

Ratner’s comments could with justification have been described as having been taken out of context -- that didn’t stop them almost destroying the company.

Ironically, the ‘crap’ remark was a well-worn joke that had even made it into the financial press in 1987. However, Ratner’s mistake in 1991 seems to have been to place it late in the day in an otherwise rather dull speech after having been told that the audience expected some humour when he himself had assumed that they would want some rather more conventional fare. As a result, it came across not so much as an instance of realism and humour being blended as a case of a retailer having disdain for his customers.

The remark ... almost caused the company to fold.

It will be interesting to see if Dianne Thompson’s career will be wrecked the way Gerald Ratner’s was.

The copyright-obsessed music industry has started to produce CDs which are "copy-protected". Well, actually, no: as Apple notes, in a page which warns of the adverse effects of attempting to play such a disc in a Mac, these discs are not CDs at all, they resemble Compact Discs (CD) but technically are not. You will, though, look long and hard at the packaging of these pseudo-CDs for any clear warning that they are not, in fact, CDs.

The joke about Sony’s copy protection is that it is easily circumvented: as Reuters reported this week, all it takes is a 99-Cent marker pen -- using this around the rim to cover the protection track allows the disk to be played in a CD-ROM drive. (And, despite the fevered fears of the music industry, playing music CDs is precisely what most people want to use CD-ROM drives for.)

Now there are concerns in the USA that Reuters may have violated the DMCA merely by reporting this. Are we about to see a big DMCA v. First Amendment court case?